The Abnormal Is Not Courage

I think it is people like my grandparents who have taught me the truth of this poem. They are not headstrong. They do not rush in when a hero is needed to save the day. They are gently saving it, bit by bit, behind the scenes: digging rocks out of the garden, loving their children, cooking a meal, carving and fitting fresh, clean wood.

Danger calls for urgency. Extraordinary circumstances need actions that are un-pondered; they call upon sheer survival instinct. It is courageous to block a speeding bullet for someone, or to march out in war, or to save a person from drowning, but I hold that courage is also steady and perpetual. It sometimes requires great thought and detail. The single mother who cooks dinner every night after work; the boy who musters the nerve to ask his teacher for help; the misunderstood artist who continues to create... these too demonstrate courage.

It is the kind of courage I want. This description fascinates me: Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality. My courage does not consist of those things which I am not, but of the "crescendo" of those things I already am. My courage will not manifest itself in a marvelous act that is completely out of my character; it will be the fruition, "the culmination," of what good I am currently cultivating in my character: love, patience, wisdom, joy. If courage were the abnormal, we would think of it as a miracle visited on the lucky, on the brave, only occasionally. If courage can indeed be cultivated, it must grow out of something that is already in us.

I don't know about you, but that inspires me.

The Abnormal Is Not Courage
by Jack Gilbert

The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
Tanks on horses. Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers.
A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
The bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Would say courage isn't that. Not at its best.
It was impossible, and with form. They rode in sunlight.
Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
It is too near the whore's heart: the bounty of impulse,
And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
Accomplishment. The even loyalty. But fresh.
Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
Not the month's rapture. Not the exception. The beauty
That is of many days. Steady and clear.
It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.

(taken from "The Contemporary American Poets: American Poetry since 1940," edited by Mark Strand, Signet Classic, copyright 1969)